The present disclosure relates to the field of data storage systems, and more particularly to efficient archiving and/or restoring of data handled by an information handling system.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to acquire, process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system (‘IHS’) generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, entertainment, and/or global communications. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
It is common to backup, vault, and/or archive data that may be processed, compiled, accessed, stored, and/or communicated by an IHS. The data may be backed up for later use by a restore process. Data backup and/or restore may be desired for reasons such as security, disaster recovery, regulatory and similar others. Many corporate information technology (IT) network administrators may designate one or more backup computers or servers to perform the data back up function. Traditionally, the data to be backed up has been archived on removable magnetic media such as tape cartridges for long term data storage.
Presently, data storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDD) are gaining wider acceptance for use in data archiving applications due to their declining costs and improved performance, especially compared to the tape drives. There are many commercially available hardware/software products such as a virtual tape library (VTL) appliance or a disk-to-disk storage appliance, which use the performance and reliability of the disk drives. The VTL appliance provides a virtually seamless integration of existing tape libraries by intercepting and archiving data that is directed to be stored on tape libraries. Thus, the VTL appliance appears like a tape library to a backup software application, enabling the user to continue using existing software and procedures for archiving. However, the VTL appliance often becomes a bottle neck for communications since all messages and/or information packets are intercepted by the VTL appliance and thus pass through the VTL appliance.
Therefore, a need exists to efficiently archive data that is directed to be stored on storage systems, including tape libraries. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide for improved throughput in data archiving in an IHS, absent disadvantages, some of which have been discussed above.